Number of serious offenders freed on compassionate grounds DOUBLES
A RECORD number of prisoners – including murderers and rapists – are being freed under the system of ‘compassionate release’.
It allows offenders to be released if they are suffering from a terminal illness and doctors believe they have less than three months to live.
However, one triple murderer is still alive five years later.
The number of prisoners released on compassionate grounds has almost doubled from nine between 2000 and 2004, to 17 in the past four years.
Of 47 releases since 2000, ten have been murderers, 11 sex offenders and eight violent criminals, as well as ten drug dealers and eight convicted of fraud or dishonesty.
They include Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who died in 2012, nearly three years after being freed.
He has been surpassed by Andrew Walker, who gunned down three soldiers in Midlothian during a payroll robbery and who is still alive five years after being moved from prison to a care home following a stroke.
The guidelines state those shown clemency should have less than three months to live.
Fiona Cunningham, whose father Major David Cunningham was mur- dered by Walker, said: ‘He committed the crime and he shouldn’t be out in a nursing home, which everyone who goes to work is paying for.
‘He is able to live his life while the other families lost husbands and fathers, and it changed their lives.’
Justice Secretary Michael Matheson had used his powers of clemency nine times up to the end of 2016, despite only taking office in November 2014.
Junior Minister Paul Wheelhouse – standing in for Mr Matheson – freed serial sex offender Thomas Riley in July last year, although he died the same day.
In seven-and-a-half years as Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill used his powers 19 times – most controversially to free Megrahi, diagnosed with prostate cancer and given less than three months to live.
Mr MacAskill also freed Walker, now 62, once one of three Scottish prisoners considered certain to die in jail.
Walker killed Major Cunningham, 56, a father of two from Kelso, Roxburghshire, along with Staff Sergeant Terence Hosker, 39, from Bradford, and father-of-one Private John Thomson, 25, from Galashiels, Selkirkshire, to steal £19,000 in Army wages in 1985.
That placed him alongside Robert Mone and Thomas McCulloch, who broke out of the State Hospital at Carstairs in 1976, killing three people.
McCulloch has now been released, while Walker, a corporal with the Royal Scots at the time of the killings, was freed in December 2011.
Described as ‘immobile’, he is living comfortably, say sources, in the nursing home at a secret location. Walker was said to be ‘severely incapacitated’ when freed and unlikely to improve.
Former Labour Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson freed ten prisoners and former Scottish Liberal leader, Lord Wallace, who formed a coalition with Labour in the inaugural Scottish parliament, released eight.
Eighteen of the 47 prisoners released died within a week. However, murderer Kevin McGhee lived for nine months after release in 2002, ordered by Lord Wallace. He was less than seven years into a life sentence.
Harry Fletcher, co-director of campaign group Voice4Victims, said: ‘We recognise the jails are full of old prisoners and that sometimes the authorities don’t know what to do with the sick and immobile. ‘But they must be satisfied there is no risk to public safety and that their victims understand the reasons for release.’
‘He committed the crime and he shouldn’t be out’